"...the subject which will be of most importance politically is Mass Psychology. ... The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. ... As yet there is only one country which has succeeded in creating this politician’s paradise.” - Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society, 1960.

Thursday, July 31, 2008

news.mywebpal.com07/31/08By DAUD SALMAN, The Institute for War & Peace Reporting

BAGHDAD — To most, the scenes of looting and wanton destruction of Iraq’s archaeological treasures that followed the U.S. invasion in 2003 are just a distant memory. But unfortunately, the country continues to lose its priceless artifacts on a daily basis as a result of theft, illegal excavations and trespassing.

The government estimates that there are around 10,000 archaeological sites in the country. Most of them are located in central Iraq, an area badly hit by the chaos and lawlessness that has gripped the country over the last several years. While some of the best-known Mesopotamian sites, such as Ur near modern-day Nasiriyah, are well-protected, many others are completely unguarded.

Qais Rashid Hussein, director general of excavations and inspection at the Ministry of Archaeology and Tourism, said there are only 1,200 troops available to protect all of Iraq’s historic treasures. That has created “a huge problem” that has left antiquities vulnerable to gangs and smugglers, he said.

Treasure hunters illegally excavate the sites for valuable items that are then traded on the black market and often smuggled out of the country. Margarete van Ess, director of Oriental Science at the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin, estimated that illegal excavation in Iraq has caused $10 billion worth of damage in recent years.

“Many of the sites are far from town centers and cities and are under the control of tribes,” she said, making them vulnerable to looters. Former President Saddam Hussein’s regime maintained tight control over most of the country’s archaeological sites and imposed stiff penalties on those caught looting. Those convicted of stealing antiquities faced 15 years in prison, and, in some cases, the death penalty. While many of those laws remain on the books, they are rarely enforced today.

Ancient coins, seals and other gold, silver and bronze pieces can be purchased on the black market in Iraq for as little as $10. But the same item offered for sale in Syria or Jordan can fetch thousands of dollars.

“A (Sumerian) cylinder seal can be bought for less than $100, and gold coins for even less (in Baghdad),” said Said Mahmood, a 52-year-old antiquities collector. “(However) the same cylinder seal can be sold for more than $2,000 outside of Iraq.” Last month, the Iraqi government announced that it was launching a concerted effort to reclaim about 15,000 artifacts believed stolen during the looting on the Baghdad Museum in 2003.

Already, Jordan has returned about 2,000 stolen items, some dating back to 7,000 B.C. In April, Syria turned over around 700 pieces, including gold coins and jewelry, which were seized by Syrian customs officials.

But even as the government reclaims stolen items, additional artifacts are being looted from unguarded sites. Sometimes, ignorance or neglect is behind the damage being done to Iraq’s ancient past. Last year, officials with the antiquities ministry discovered that a new housing project was about to be built on top of a priceless archeological site; in Baghdad, a similar site was being used as a garbage dump until authorities intervened.

Khalid Sultan, a Baghdad-based archaeology expert, said both the Iraqi government and the international community need to do more to protect the country’s past.

“The destruction of Iraqi antiquities after the 2003 war has been enormous,” he said. “We need a massive effort from the international community to return the stolen pieces and to help us to protect the remaining archaeological sites.”

Daud Salman is a reporter in Iraq who writes for The Institute for War & Peace Reporting, a nonprofit organization that trains journalists in areas of conflict. Readers may write to the author at the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, 48 Grays Inn Road, London WC1X 8LT, U.K.; Web site: www.iwpr.net. For information about IWPR’s funding, please go to http://www.iwpr.net/index.pl?top—supporters.html.

Yesteraday, at 5:09 pm, I had a call from Lincoln, Nebraska attorney John DeCamp, author of The Franklin Cover-Up, and his legal assistant, Bobby Kosmicki. They were driving away from the Ogden, Utah courtroom - where Robert Wadman made one more attempt to suppress allegations of statutory rape and conspiracy to conceal the evidence, among other serious charges - in jubilant spirits. This was decent enough news because Wadman is also suing my publisher, Adam Parfrey, for libel - thirteen years after my own book, Psychic Dictatorshiip in the USA, was printed.

Thie trial was over in a couple of hours, and DeCamp didn't exactly limp away from it a legal eunuch, as Wadman hoped.

John DeCamp

DeCamp moved early on in the proceeding to have the suit thrown out because in many states a libel suit cannot be filed in small claims. The judge saw it differently, however, and maintained that though the case should have been brought in district or superior court, Utah statutes grant him the authority to preside over libel claims.

So Wadman pressed on, claiming that DeCamp's book had defamed him and caused him to lose employment as an overseas advisor in international policing by the Bush Justice Department, resulting in a "loss of income." Little evidence was presented at trial, though, and in the end the judge ruled in favor of DeCamp, although Wadman has the right of appeal.

According to Ms. Kosmicki, the former police chief's testimony consisted of"continual misstatements and a lot of whining of victimization, and lies about being besieged by DeCamp office's 'death threats.""

Wadman's perjured case against myself and my publisher hinges on his contention that he "does not know Larry King," the Republican whig at the epicenter of the Omaha scandal, among other claims.

Wadman has gone so far as to swear under oath that he barely knew King.

DeCamp, in a post-publication interview:

"... That's not what King says. In April 22, 1989 interviews with King and Wadman, Frank Brown of TV-7, Omaha, questioned them about an incident in which Wadman intervened at King's request, to order the release of a suitcase seized in a drug raid.

BROWN: King acknowledges he is a friend of Chief Wadman's. We asked King did he call the chief to get a suitcase released that had been seized in a drug investigation?

BROWN: You had that friendship where, you could -

KING: Yes. http://www.vrijheids.net/media/The_Franklin_Cover_Up.pdf

Robert Wadman also claims that he does not know Alisha Owen, who has testified (and never recanted) that the-then chief of the Omaha police department is the father of her child, and that she had sex with him at the age of 14. From the Nebraska Leadership Conference Newsletter, No. 2, Oct. 11, 1991:

"[Alisha] Owen stated that when she first met Police Chief Robert Wadman, she was a virgin." This was at a party in Omaha. "Another party took place on August 31, at the same location. Present were 'Alfie Allen, Larry King, Alan Baer, Robert Wadman ... "

And so it goes. Wadman denies everything. My publisher meets him in the courtroom in September.

Stay tuned for more details - and word on my own suit against Wadman - who has actually written to by distributor, claiming that Psychic Dictatorship is under "litigation" (he fails to mention that it's in small claims court) and should be recalled, removed from the shelves. This is a lame attempt to censor my books and abridge my first amendment rights.

In California, there are anti-SLAPP statutes against filing harassment suits to silence journalists ... like good ol' Alex Constantine, as Wadman is about to find out.*

So I'll be filing a suit against him to put a stop to this stalking and filing groundless legal compliants in a pathetic attempt to silence DeCamp and myself.•••••••http://www.casp.net/slapps/mengen.html

* What are SLAPPs?

SLAPPs — Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation — are civil complaints or counterclaims (against either an individual or an organization) in which the alleged injury was the result of petitioning or free speech activities protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. SLAPPs are often brought by corporations, real estate developers, or government officials and entities against individuals who oppose them on public issues. Typically, SLAPPs are based on ordinary civil tort claims such as defamation, conspiracy, and interference with prospective economic advantage.

While most SLAPPs are legally meritless, they effectively achieve their principal purpose: to chill public debate on specific issues. Defending a SLAPP requires substantial money, time, and legal resources and thus diverts the defendant's attention away from the public issue. Equally important, however, a SLAPP also sends a message to others: you, too, can be sued if you speak up.

Every year thousands of people are hit with SLAPPs for such activities as writing a letter to a newspaper, reporting misconduct by public officals, speaking at public meetings, filing complaints with officials over violations of labor laws or health and safety laws, "whistleblowing" in corporations, or organizing tenants. ...

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Once again, the Conservative Voice, a mine of ringing right-wing propaganda, is taking me to task for debunking the "Islamo-fascism" red herring.

Paul Krugman is correct: "There isn’t actually any such thing as Islamofascism — it’s not an ideology; it’s a figment of the neocon imagination."http://neveryetmelted.com/index.php/no-islamofascism/

Neocons parroting Bush, badly in need of a dictionary, promote the "islamo-fascism" line, eg. Raymond Ibrahim, editor of the Al Qaeda Reader, an omelet of texts written by Islamic extremists, and compares the words of Al Qaeda to Mein Kampf.

It's fairly well-known that Horowitz receives generous funding from Richard Mellon Scaife - a CIA propagandist since the early days of the cold war. (The intelligence connection runs in the family: "During World War II, while Richard and Cordelia's father, Alan Scaife, served in Europe in the OSS, the forerunner to the CIA, the Scaife family lived in Washington."- http://www.salon.com/news/1998/04/07news.html)

Scaife supports a phalanx of organizations that, like the FrontPage site, distribute fascist propaganda. They all have ties to the CIA:

Most of these CIA-subsidized propagandists are towing the "Islamo-Fascism" clunker. Krugman: " ... a bunch of lightly armed terrorists and a fourth-rate military power — which aren’t even allies — pose a greater danger than Hitler’s panzers or the Soviet nuclear arsenal ever did. ... "http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/10/29/krugman-no-such-thing-as-islamofascism/

Blogger Steve Benen comments, "The politics of fear might be more effective if it were grounded in reality."

Why point the finger at the Middle East, when actual fascism is corporate and would probably not exist without the capitalistic impetus that flows internationally from the United States?

Fascism is unbridled capitalism - it is a feature of American life. It elevates thugs and criminals to positions of power. It is inherently conspiratorial and engages in acts of destruction to advance itself. Scapegoating "Islamo-fascists" - when American corporations in league with their corallaries in Germany, Japan, Italy, etc., make fascism possible and feed the geo-genocidal beast. The Arabs may have had Nazi collaborators, as did America itself, many more, but make no mistake about it, the U.S. is the beating heart of it all.

• BTW, what kind of sneakers do the Good Germans wear at Conservative Voice? What music do they listen to? Could be pertinent ...

Fascism is all-American - all-capitalist, all-corporate, all-degenerative. The yahoos who prattle about "Islamo-fascism" echo G.W. Bush, who hails from a family with reasonably well-known Nazi financial connections.

The great brainwashed finger-pointers are turned the wrong direction. America's ruling elite are the fascists, and they are bringing the country to its knees.

As part of the U.S. Navy's investigation into futuristic nonlethal weaponry, the Sierra Nevada Corporation is building a microwave energy pulse gun that can produce a painful screaming sound inside a person's head from a long distance away. The inescapable sound, which is inaudible to untargeted bystanders, can be set to irritate, nauseate or even incapacitate people and animals that lie within range. Future applications may include crowd control, military use and even incapacitate people and animals that lie within range.

Future applications may include crowd control, military use and even shopping mall security, provided it proves safe from permanent side effects.

The science behind it also has the potential to give hearing to certain deaf people, or even projecting voices into peoples' heads.

The Sierra Nevada corporation has signed a contract with the U.S. Navy to follow up on successful recent testing of a non-lethal crowd control weapon that uses microwaves to project high-intensity sounds in the heads of targets, according to New Scientist magazine.

The MEDUSA (Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio) system makes use of the well-established Microwave Auditory Effect, in which microwave stimulation causes parts of the ear around the cochlea to expand thermally, which is interpreted as sound by the brain. The effect is a sound that appears to originate in the target's head, and can't be heard by anyone not directly in the beam's path.

This is not to be confused with Raytheon's Active Denial System, another crowd control weapon in development which uses a similar directed energy beam to cause unbearable but non-damaging heat pain in the top few layers of a target's skin.

Because MEDUSA's sound doesn't vibrate the eardrum itself, and thus the eardrum is not exposed to the damage potential that loud acoustic noise produces, traditional noise level limits don't have to apply with the MEDUSA system. So it's possible to dial in any level of sonic deterrent from mildly annoying up to physically and mentally incapacitating levels that the target has no way of blocking out of their head.

The MEDUSA system has the ability to be aimed at specific targets, multiple targets or even cover large areas with a broad beam, which will make it an effective security deterrent for the perimeters of protected areas. The same technology, on a smaller scale, could be used as an invisible sonic scarecrow to keep certain areas free from birds, as birds appear to respond to very low levels of microwave audio.

There are certain side effects - in 1961 testing of the first Microwave Auditory Effect system, Allen H. Frey noted dizziness, headaches and pins and needles in his subjects - and little is known about what further effects might occur when power levels are turned up to an incapacitating level. The potential for serious neural damage can't be ignored when you're effectively microwaving the inside of somebody's head - and if it does turn out to be lethal, the research may continue down that path and the technology may end up being used as a microwave death ray.

Beyond being used to generate an annoying high-pitched scream, the Microwave Auditory Effect has shown itself to hold interesting peacetime possibilities if it can be proven safe. By modulating the projected frequency, Sharp and Grove showed in 1975 that it's possible to "plant" voices, music and other sounds directly into the head.

Because the eardrum is not involved in the transmission of this sound, there have been hopes that patients with outer ear problems might be able to listen to music or voices through microwave transmission. On a more sinister note, it's easy to see how one might abuse the ability to direct "voices" straight into a person's head, as would appear to be feasible using the device described in this 2002 patent.

Still, the MEDUSA system is expected to be testable within one year and a mobile deployment unit built within another 18 months. And if it can be proven not to be harmful, it could be deployed within a few years in warzones, protest situations and shopping malls.•••••••IEEE Spectrum Online

Death Ray

The MEDUSA crowd control ray gun we reported on earlier this month sounded like some pretty amazing—and downright scary—technology. Using the microwave auditory effect, the beam, in theory, would have put sounds and voice-like noises in your head, thereby driving you away from the area. Crowd control via voices in your head. Sounds cool. However, it turns out that the beam would actually kill you before any of that happy stuff started taking place, most likely by frying or cooking your brain inside your skull. Can you imagine if this thing made it out into the field? Awkward!

“Any kind of exposure you could give to someone that wouldn’t burn them to a crisp would produce a sound too weak to have any effect,” said Kenneth Foster, a bioengineering professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Foster knows what he's talking about, too. In 1974 he published the first research on the microwave auditory effect.

Fellow scientist and microwave research author Bill Guy agrees, citing some hard facts to support his conclusions:

Guy says that experiments have demonstrated that radiation at 40 microjoules per pulse per square centimeter produces sound at zero decibels, which is just barely in hearing range. To produce sound at 60 decibels, or the sound of normal conversation, requires 40 watts per square centimeter of radiation. “That would kill you pretty fast,” Guy says. Producing an unpleasant sound, at about 120 decibels, would take 40 million W/cm2 of energy. One milliwatt per square centimeter is considered to be the safety threshold.

Both scientists were in agreement about one other thing too: the MEDUSA just morphed from a crowd-control device into a monstrous weapon. We need more of those, right?

President Bush is depicted as a rudderless young party animal in an upcoming Oliver Stone movie about his life, a trailer for the film shows.A youthful Bush is shown gambling, taking a swing at his famous dad and downing shots of booze in the 96-second clip promoting the flick.

"What exactly are you cut out for?" asks by an actor playing the part of President George H.W. Bush. "Partying, chasing tail, driving drunk?"

The younger Bush is depicted slamming his car into a house and being led into a jail cell, a dramatization of his drunken-driving arrests. ...

WASHINGTON — Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, the longest-serving Republican senator in United States history and a figure of great influence in Washington as well as in his home state, has been indicted on federal corruption charges.

Mr. Stevens, 84, was indicted on seven counts of falsely reporting income. The charges are related to renovations on his home and to gifts he has received. They arise from an investigation that has been under way for more than a year, in connection with the senator’s relationship with a businessman who oversaw the home-remodeling project.

The indictment will surely reverberate through the November elections. Mr. Stevens, who has been in the Senate for 40 years, is up for re-election this year. Mark Begich, a popular Democratic mayor of Anchorage, hopes to supplant him.

The Justice Department scheduled a news conference for Tuesday afternoon to announce the indictment.

Republicans on Capitol Hill were already jittery over a lobbying and influence-peddling scandal related to the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who is now in prison. Mr. Stevens’s troubles are not linked to that affair. Instead, they stem from his ties to an oil executive whose company won millions of dollars in federal contracts with the help of Mr. Stevens, whose home in Alaska was almost doubled in size in the renovation project.

Mr. Stevens is a former chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and he is still on the panel. As chairman, he wielded huge influence, and did not hesitate to use it to steer money and projects to his state.

“No other senator fills so central a place in his state’s public and economic life as Ted Stevens of Alaska,” the Almanac of American Politics says. “Quite possibly, no other senator ever has.”

Mr. Stevens, one of only a handful of World War II veterans left in the Senate, grew up in Indiana and California and moved to Alaska in 1950, before it was a state, according to the political almanac. He first ran for the Senate in 1962, losing to Ernest Gruening, a Democrat. He was appointed to fill a vacant seat in the Senate in 1968 by the governor at the time, Walter Hickel, and has been re-elected six times since then.

Word spread through the Capitol like an electric current, prompting whispers among senators and staff. The Democrats were gathering in a room near the Senate chamber for their weekly conference lunch. Republicans, meanwhile, moved their lunch to the headquarters of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, a common change of venue when the primary topic of discussion is politics.

Mr. Stevens is seen as a legendary, even heroic, figure in Alaska, who played a crucial role in its achievement of statehood, which became official in 1959. According to Senate Republican rules, Mr. Stevens will have to give up his leadership positions, which include some hugely powerful posts, as the senior Republican on the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and the defense appropriations subcommittee.

The long-running federal corruption investigation in Alaska has been hanging over Mr. Stevens as he faces his toughest re-election contest in many years. Mr. Begich was expected to mount a strong challenge even before word of the indictment spread.

Alaska, which last elected a Democratic senator in 1974, is one of several seemingly unlikely states where Democrats believe they have a strong chance of pulling off upset victories in the November elections.

The indictment comes nearly a year after federal agents raided Mr. Stevens’s home as part of a continuing investigation into corruption that had already ensnared the senator’s son, Ben Stevens, who was then president of the State Senate.

Though lawmakers have been aware of the Justice Department inquiry for some time, the news of an indictment still came as something of a shock this week, as both houses of Congress are trying to wrap up legislative business before the monthlong August recess.

Senator Daniel Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii, who is the chairman of the defense appropriations subcommittee and a friend of Mr. Stevens, said that “he is innocent until proven guilty.” Mr. Inouye said he did not expect that the indictment would interfere with Senator Stevens’s ability to work in the Senate.

Other lawmakers, including Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, the chairwoman of the ethics committee, said they needed to know more about the indictment before commenting.

Monday, July 28, 2008

One should judge Nicolas Sarkozy according to his actions, and not according to his personality. Yet when his doings surprise even his own constituents, it is legitimate to take a detailed look at his biography and question the bonds that brought him to power. Thierry Meyssan has decided to write the truth about the French Republic’s president background. All the information included in this article is provable, except for two assertions signalled by the author who alone takes full responsibility.

26 JULY 2008

Tired of the overextended presidencies of François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac, the French elected Nicolas Sarkozy counting on his energy to revitalize their country. They were hoping for a break with years of no-change and ideologies of the past. What they got instead was a break with the very principles which founded the French nation, and have been shocked by this “hyper-president”, seizing every day a new dossier, attracting towards him the right and the left wing, and tearing apart all points of reference to the point of creating a total confusion.

Like children who have just made a boo-boo, the French are too busy trying to find excuses for themselves to admit the magnitude of the damages and of their naiveté, and they refuse all the more to see who Nicolas Sarkozy really is, that they realize they should have known since a long time who he was.

One must say the man has talents. Like a magician he tricked them. By offering them the spectacle of his private life and posing in People’s magazines, he got them to forget his political history.

The aim of this article must be clearly understood. It is not to reproach to M. Sarkozy his family, his friends or his professional ties, but the fact of having hidden those ties from the French who believed, wrongly, they were electing a free man.

To understand how a man whom all agree today to view as an agent of the United States and of Israel was able to become the head of the Gaullist party and the president of the French Republic, we must go back in time, very very far back. We must make a long digression in the course of which we will present the protagonists who are today taking their revenge.

The family secrets

At the end of Second World War, the United States secret services relied on Italo-US godfather, Lucky Luciano, to control the security of American ports and prepare their disembarking in Sicily. The main contacts of Luciano — held at that time at a New York luxury prison — to the US intelligence services went notably through Frank Wisner, Sr. Later, when the “godfather” was liberated and chose to exile in Italy, they operated through his Corsican “Ambassador”, Étienne Léandri.

In 1958, worried about a possible victory of the FLN in Algeria which could open the way to Soviet influence in Northern Africa, the United States decided to provoke a military coup d’Etat in France. The operation was jointly organized by the Cia’s Direction of Planning – theoretically lead by Frank Wisner, Sr. – and by NATO. But Wisner had already become senile by that time and it was his successor, Allan Dulles, who supervised the coup. Out of Algeria, French generals organized a Public Salvation Committee which pressured the Parisian civilian authorities to vote full powers to General de Gaulle without having had to use force.

Yet, Charles de Gaulle was not the pawn the Anglo-Saxons had believed they could manipulate. In a first phase, he attempted to deal with the colonial contradiction by granting to the overseas territories a large autonomy within the French Union. But it was already too late to save the French empire; the colonized people didn’t believe any longer in the promises of the Metropolitan France and demanded their independence. After victorious but fierce repression against those fighting for independence, de Gaulle decided to face reality, and in a rare show of political wisdom, he granted independence to each colony.

This turn about was perceived by most of those who brought him to power as a betrayal. The CIA and NATO supported then all kinds of plots to eliminate him, among which a missed coup and some 40 attempts to murder him. However, certain of his followers approved of his political evolution. Around Charles Pasqua, they created the SAC (Civic action services), a militia to protect him.

Pasqua was both a Corsican bandit and a former resistant. He married the daughter of a Canadian bootlegger who made fortune during the prohibition and he directed the Ricard company who, after commercialising absinthe, a forbidden alcohol, won respectability by converting to the sales of another alcohol based on liquorice (anisette). The company continued however to serve as a cover for all sorts of traffics connected to the New York Italian American family of the Genovese (and) that of Lucky Luciano. It is therefore not surprising that Pasqua called on Étienne Léandri (Ambassador of Luciano) to recruit the hands that constituted the Gaullist militia. A third man played an important role in the formation of the SAC, the former body guard of de Gaulle, Achille Peretti, also a Corsican.

Thus protected, de Gaulle designs an audacious national independence policy. Even though asserting his belonging to the Atlantic camp, he questions the Anglo-Saxon leadership. He opposes the entry of the United Kingdom into the European common market (1961 and 1967); refuses the deployment of UN helmets into Congo (1961); encourages the Latin American states to become free of US imperialism (speech of Mexico, 1964); kicks NATO out France and withdraws from the Atlantic Alliance’s integrated command (1966); he condemns Israeli expansionism during the Six Day war (1967); supports independence of Quebec (Speech of Montreal 1967), etc.

Simultaneously, de Gaulle consolidated the power of France by endowing it with a military industrial-complex including a nuclear deterrent and guarantying its energy provisions. He conveniently distanced the encumbering Corsicans of his entourage by entrusting them with foreign missions. Thus, Étienne Léandri became a leader of the ELF group (today Total), while Charles Pasqua the trusted man of the Francophone heads of State in Africa.

Conscious that he could not defy the Anglo-Saxons on all fronts at the same time, De Gaulle allied himself to the Rothschild family, choosing as Prime Minister, Georges Pompidou, who was the fondé de pouvoir of the bank. The two men constituted an efficient tandem, the political audacity of the first never losing sight of the economic realism of the second.

When De Gaulle resigned in 1969, Georges Pompidou succeeded him briefly at the Presidency before being taken out by a cancer. The historical Gaullists did not admit his leadership, however, and worried about his anglophile proclivities. They howled treason when Pompidou, supported by the General Secretary of the Élysée, Edouard Balladur, had “perfidious Albion” join the European Common Market.

The making of Nicolas Sarkozy

That decorum having been put into place, we can now return to our main character, Nicolas Sarkozy. Born in 1955 he is son to a Hungarian catholic nobleman, Pal Sarkösy of Nagy-Bosca, who sought refuge in France after fleeing the Red Army, and to Andree Mallah, a Jewish commoner from Thessalonica. After having three children (Guillaume, Nicolas and François), the couple divorced. Pal Sarkösy of Nagy-Bocsa remarried with an aristocrat, Christine de Ganay, with whom he had two children (Pierre Olivier and Caroline). Nicolas will not be raised by his own parents alone, but will go back and forth within this recomposed family.

His mother became the secretary of De Gaulle’s bodyguard, Achille Peretti. The latter, after founding the SAC, pursued a brilliant political career. He was elected Deputy and Mayor of Neuilly sur Seine, the richest residential suburb of the capital, and later President of the National Assembly. Unfortunately, in 1972, Achille Peretti comes under grave accusations. In the United States, Time Magazine reveals the existence of a secret criminal organization « the Corsican Union » which controls a large part of the drug trade between Europe and America, the famous « French connection » which Hollywood popularized on the large screen. Based on parliamentary auditions and on his own investigations, Time names the name of a mafia boss, Jean Venturi, arrested a few years earlier in Canada, who is none other than Charles Pasqua’s commercial delegate at the liquor society Ricard. The names of several families headed by the “Corsican Union” are cited, among which that of the Peretti. Achille denies, but is forced to renounce to the presidency of the National Assembly, and barely escapes a “suicide”…

In 1977, Pal Sarkösy of Nagy-Bocsa separates from his second wise, Christine de Ganay, who then gets together with the N°2 of the US State Department central administration. She marries him and settles in America with him. The world being very small, as everyone knows, her husband is none other than Frank Wisner, Jr, son of the previous. Junior’s responsibilities at the CIA are unknown, but it is clear that he plays an important role. Nicolas, who remains close to his mother in law, his half brother and his half sister, begins to turn towards the United States where he “benefits” from training programs of the State Department.

During that same period, Nicolas Sarkozy adheres to the Gaullist party coming into frequent contact with Charles Pasqua, who was not only a national leader then, but also the head of the party’s Haut de Seine department section.

Having finished Law School in 1982 and joined the Barr association, Nicolas Sarkozy married the niece of Achille Peretti. His best man was Charles Pasqua. As a lawyer, Sarkozy defended the interests of his mentors Corsican friends. He bought a property on the Island of Beauty, in Vico, and went as far as envisaging to make his name more “Corsican” by replacing the “y” by an “i”: Sarkozi.

The next year, he was elected Mayor of Neuilly sur Seine in replacement of his uncle in law, Achille Peretti, thundered by a heart attack. However, it was not long before Nicolas Sarkozy betrayed his wife, and since 1984, he had a secret liaison with Cecilia, the wife of the most famous entertainer of French television at that time, Jacques Martin, whom he had met while celebrating their marriage, a function he exerted being mayor of Neuilly. That double life lasted five years, before the lovers decided to quit their respective couples in order to build a new home.

In 1992, Nicolas was best man in the marriage of Jacques Chirac’s daughter, Claude, with an editorialist of Le Figaro. He couldn’t refrain himself from seducing Claude and having a short liaison with her, while officially living with Cecilia. The cuckold husband committed suicide by absorbing drugs. The break was brutal and without pardon between the Chirac’s and Nicolas Sarkozy.

In 1993, the left lost the legislative elections. President François Mitterrand refused to resign and entered into cohabitation with a right wing Prime Minister. Jacques Chirac who ambitioned the presidency, and was thinking at that point of constituting, with Edoaurd Balladur, a couple comparable to that of De Gaulle and Pompidou, refused to be Prime minister and left his post to his “30 year long friend”, Edouard Balladur. In spite of his sulphurous past, Charles Pasqua became Interior Minister. While keeping high hand over Moroccan marijuana trade, he took advantage of his situation to legalize his other activities taking control of casinos, gambling and horse races in francophone Africa. He wove ties with Saudi Arabia and Israel and became an officer of honour to the Mossad. Nicolas Sarkozy on his part, became minister of Budget and spokesman for the government.

In Washington, Frank Wisner, Jr. became the successor of Paul Wolfowitz as head of the Political Planning department of the Department of Defense. Nobody noticed at that time the ties to the spokesman of the French government.

It is then that tensions similar to those which rocked the Gaullist party 30 years earlier, broke out between the historical Gaullists and the financial right wing, incarnated by Balladur. The new element was that Charles Pasqua and along with him, the young Nicolas Sarkozy, betray Jacques Chirac in order to join the Rothschild current. Mayhem breaks out. The conflict will reach a climax in 1995 when Edouard Balladur ran for president, against his former friend, Jacques Chirac, and was beaten. Foremost, following instructions from London and Washington, the Balladur government opened negotiations for membership status to the European Union and NATO to States of Central and Eastern Europe who had freed from Soviet control.

Havoc reigns then in the Gaullist party where the friends of yesterday are ready to kill themselves today. To be able to finance his electoral campaign, Edouard Balladur attempts to grab the secret slush fund of the Gaullist party, hidden in the double deckered accounting of the books of the oil group ELF.

The ride through the desert

Through out his first mandate, Jacques Chirac keeps Nicolas Sarkozy at arms distance. The man was discrete during his ride through the desert. Discretely, however, he continued to weave ties to the financial circles.

In 1996, finally succeeding to bring to conclusion an endless divorce procedure, Nicolas Sarkozy marries Cecilia. Two billionaires were their best men, Martin Bouygues and Bernard Arnaud (the richest man of the country).

The final act

Way before the Iraqi crisis, Frank Wisner Jr. and his colleagues at the CIA plan the destruction of the Gaullist current and the coming to power of Nicolas Sarkozy. They move in three phases: first, the elimination of the leadership of the Gaullist party and the take over of the party apparatus, then the elimination of his main right wing rival and the securing the nomination to the presidential election for the Gaullist party; finally, the elimination of any serious challenger on the left to make sure that Nicolas would win the presidential election.

During years, posthumous revelations by a real estate dealer kept the media on their toes. Before dying from a terminal disease, for reasons which remain unknown, he decided to video tape his confessions and for reasons which are even more obscure, the “cassette” landed in the hands of a Socialist party leader, Dominique Strauss Kahn, who addressed it indirectly to the media.

While the confessions of the real estate dealer did not lead to any juridical sanctions, they opened up the Pandora’s Box. The main victim of the series of scandals was Prime Minister Alain Juppé. To protect Chirac, he assumed alone all the penal sanctions. The removal of Juppé from the front lodges opened the way for the take by Sarkozy of the leadership of the Gaullist party.

Sarkozy exploited then his position to force Jacques Chirac to take him into the government once again, in spite of their reciprocal hatred. In the end, he became Interior Minister. Mistake ! This post gave him control over the prefects and the internal intelligence apparatus which he used to gain positions of power over the large administrations.

He dealt also with Corsican affairs. Prefect Claude Érignac was murdered. Even though nobody claimed it, the murder was immediately interpreted as a challenge by the independentists to the Republic. Following a long hunt, the police managed to arrest a fleeing suspect, Yvan Colonna, son of a Socialist deputy. Caring little about the presumption of innocence, Nicolas Sarkozy announced the arrest, accusing the suspect of being the assassin. The news is too important, a mere two days away from the referendum the minister has organized in Corsica to modify the status of the island. Be as it may, the electors reject the Sarkozy project, who, according to some, favoured mafia interests. While Yvan Colonna was ultimately declared guilty, he always claimed his innocence and no material proof was ever found against him. Strangely, the man preferred to remain totally silent rather than reveal what he actually knew. We reveal here that prefect Érignac was not directly killed by the nationalists, but by a paid killer, immediately exfiltrated towards Angola where he was hired to the security of the Elf group. The mobile of the crime was precisely connected to the previous functions of Érignac, responsible for the African networks at Pasqua’s cooperation ministry. As for Yvan Colonna, he is a personal friend of Nicolas Sarkozy since decades and their children have entertained social relations.

A new scandal broke out then: phoney computer listings were circulating falsely accusing several personalities of hiding bank accounts in Luxembourg, at Clearstream. Among the defamed personalities: Nicolas Sarkozy, who filed a suit insinuating that he suspected his right wing rival to the presidency, Dominique de Villepin, to have organized this machination. Sarkozy didn’t hide his intention either to throw him in jail. In reality, the false listings were put in circulation by members of the French American Foundation, of which John Negroponte was the president and Frank Wisner Jr, the administrator. What the judges ignored and which we reveal here is that the listings were fabricated in London by a common office of the CIA and of MI6, Hakluyt and co, of which Frank Wisner is also an administrator.

Villepin denied the accusations, but was indicted, assigned to residence and, de facto, eliminated from political life temporarily. The road is thus free on the right wing for Nicolas Sarkozy. It remained for the opposition candidacies to be neutralized. The membership fees to the Socialist party were reduced to a symbolic level in order to attract new activists. Suddenly, thousands of youth take membership cards. Among them, there were at least 10 000 new members who are in reality militants from the “Lambertist” Trotskyite party, (named after its founder Pierre Lambert). This small extreme left group historically served the CIA against the Stalinist communists during the cold war (it is the equivalent of the Social democrats/USA of Max Schatchman, who trained the US neo-conservatives). It is not the first time the “Lambertists” infiltrate the Socialist party. They introduced there two notorious CIA agents : Lionel Jospin (who became Prime minister) and Jean Christophe Cambadelis, the main advisor to Dominique Strauss Kahn.

Primaries were organized inside the Socialist party to designate its candidate to the presidential election. Two personalities were competing: Laurent Fabius and Ségolène Royal. Only the first was a danger for Sarkozy. Dominique Strauss Kahn came into the race with the mission to eliminate Fabius at the last moment. Something he did with the help of the votes of the infiltrated “lambertists”, who voted not for him but for Royal.

The operation is possible because Strauss Kahn is since long on the pay roll of the United States. Frenchmen ignore that he teaches at Stanford, where he was hired by the prévot Dean of the University, Condoleeza Rice. From the beginning of his term, Nicolas Sarkozy and Condoleeza Rice will thank Strauss Kahn by having him elected to the leadership of the International Monetary fund.

First days at the Élysée

The evening of the second round of the presidential election, when polling agencies announced his probable victory, Nicolas Sarkozy gave a short speech to the nation from his general campaign quarters. Then, contrary to all custom, he didn’t celebrate with the militants of his party, but went to the Fouquet’s. The famous brasserie at the Champs-Élysées, formerly the place of rendez-vous of the “Corsican union” is today the property of Casino magnate, Dominique Desseigne. It was lent to the elected president to receive his friends and main campaign donors. Some hundred guests crowded there, the richest men of France hobnobbing with the casino bosses.

The elected president then offered himself some days of well merited rest. Transported to Malta by a private Falcon 900, he relaxed on the Paloma, a 65 m yacht of his friend Vincent Bollore, a billionaire trained at the Rothschild bank.

Finally, Nicolas Sarkozy was inaugurated president of the French Republic. The first decree he signed was not to enact an amnesty, but to authorize the casinos of his friends Desseigne and Partouche to multiply the money machines.

He composed his working team and his government. Without surprise, one finds there an ominous casino owner (the minister of Youth and Sports) and the lobbyist of the casinos of his friend Desseigne (who became a spokesman of the “Gaullist party”.)

Nicolas Sarkozy relies above all on 4 men :

Claude Guéant, secretary general of the Elysée Palace, the former right hand of Charles Pasqua.

François Pérol, under-secretary general of the Elysée, an associate manager of the Rothschild bank.

Jean-David Lévitte, diplomatic advisor. Son of the former director of the Jewish Agency. French ambassador to the UN, he was removed by Chirac who judged him too close to George Bush.

Alain Bauer, the man of the shadows. His name does not appear in the directories. He is in charge of the secret services. Former Grand Master of the French Great Orient (the most important Masonic organization in France) and former N°2 of the United States National Security Agency in Europe.

Frank Wisner Jr. who in the meantime was named “special envoy” to President Bush for the independence of Kosovo, insisted that Bernard Kouchner be named minister of Foreign affairs with a double mission priority: the independence of Kosovo and the elimination of France’s Arab policy.

Kouchner started his career by participating in the creation of a humanitarian NGO. Thanks to financial support from the National Endowment for Democracy, he took part in operations of Zbigniew Brzezinski in Afghanistan against the soviets, along sides with Oussama Ben Laden and the Karzai brothers. One finds him again in the 90’s working with Alija Izetbegovic in Bosnia Herzegovina. From 1999 to 2001 he was high representatives of the UN to Kosovo.

Under the rule of the youngest brother of president Hamid Karzaï, Afghanistan became the first world producer of opium poppies transformed in heroin locally and transported by the US Air force to Camp Bondsteed (Kosovo). There, the men of Hacim Thaci take charge of the drug and distribute it mainly in Europe and accessorily in the United States. The benefits are used to finance the illegal operations of the CIA. Karzai and Thaci are longstanding personal friends of Bernard Kouchner who undoubtedly ignores their criminal activities in spite of all the international reports which have been dedicated to them.

To complete his government, Nicolas Sarkozy named Christine Lagarde, minister of the Economy and Finances. All her career was made in the United States where she directed the prestigious law firm Baker and McKenzie. At the Center for international and strategic studies of Dick Cheney, she copresided with Zbigniew Brzezinski a working group which supervised the privatisations in Poland. She organized also an intense lobbying effort for Lockheed Martin against French airplane producer Dassault.

New escapade during the summer. Nicolas, Cecilia, their common mistress and their children went on holidays to the United States at Wolfeboro, not far from the property of President Bush. The bill was paid this time by Robert F. Agostinelli, an Italian-New Yorker investment banker, Zionist and a pure brand of neo-conservative who writes in Commentary, the magazine of the American Jewish Committee.

The success of Nicolas had impact on his half brother, Pierre Olivier. Under the American name of Oliver, he was named by Frank Carlucci (formerly N°2 of the CIA after having been recruited by Frank Wisner, Sr.) Director of the new investment fund of the Carlyle Group (the common investment firm of the Bush family and Ben Laden). Having become the 5th largest business dealer in the world, he handles the main assets of the sovereign funds of Kuwait and Singapore.

The popularity of the President is in a free fall in the polls. One of his communications advisors, Jacques Seguela (also consultant for political communication at the NED where he is in charge of diverse CIA operations in Western Europe and Latin America), proposes to detract the public’s attention with new “people stories”. The announcement of the divorce with Cecilia was publicised by Libération, the paper of his friend Edouard de Rothschild, to cover up the slogans of demonstrators in a day of general strike. Stronger even, the communications agent organized a meeting between the president and the former top model, Carla Bruni. Some days later, her liaison with the president became official and the media hammering covered up once again political criticism. Some weeks later, the third marriage of Nicolas occurred. This time, he chose as best men Mathilde Agostinelle (the wife of Robert) and Nicolas Bazire, a former cabinet director of Edouard Balladur who became assistant manager at the Rothschilds.

In February, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) voted against a bill banning the CIA from waterboarding and using other torture tactics in their interrogations. When the bill passed, McCain urged Bush to veto it, which he did.

In an interview with Newsweek published today, McCain defended his position, insisting that the CIA plays “a special role” in defending the U.S. and thus should be allowed to use harsh interrogation tactics such as waterboarding:

NEWSWEEK: On torture, why should the CIA be treated differently from the armed services regarding the use of harsh interrogation tactics?

MCCAIN: Because they play a special role in the United States of America and our ability to combat terrorists. But we have made it very clear that there is nothing they can do that would violate the Geneva Conventions, the Detainee Treatment Act, which prohibits torture. We could never torture anyone, but some people misconstrue that who don’t understand what the Detainee Treatment Act and the Geneva Conventions are all about.

Still, waterboarding remains in the CIA’s tool kit. The technique can be used, but it requires the consent of the attorney general and president on a case-by-case basis. Bush wants to keep that option open.

“I cannot sign into law a bill that would prevent me, and future presidents, from authorizing the CIA to conduct a separate, lawful intelligence program, and from taking all lawful actions necessary to protect Americans from attack,” Bush said in a statement.

McCain is either clueless or ignorant about the fact that his vote allows the CIA to waterboard detainees. And as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), one of McCain’s chief surrogates, has said about waterboarding, “I don’t think you have to have a lot of knowledge about the law to understand this technique violates Geneva Convention common article three, the War Crimes statutes, and many other statutes that are in place.”

Plans for a war crimes tribunal at Guantanamo Bay have long faced intense criticism, including from the tribunal's one-time chief prosecutor. The first trial started last week: Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden, has been charged with conspiracy and material support for terrorism.

No records of the agency's interrogations of Salim Ahmed Hamdan can be subpoenaed, and no agent can be called to testify about what he or she learned from Osama bin Laden's former driver.

When defense attorney Harry H. Schneider Jr. attempted to demonstrate how many interrogations Hamdan had undergone in the months after his November 2001 arrest -- at least 40 -- he couldn't list the CIA along with more than a dozen other agencies including the Secret Service and what was then known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

The prohibition against naming the CIA came in a "protective order" issued by the court at the government's request. The tribunal's deputy chief prosecutor, Army Col. Bruce A. Pagel, couldn't say which agency sought the shield or what arguments were made to justify it.

We just traded e-mails with journalist Jonathan Mahler, a New York Times Magazine writer and author of the forthcoming book on Hamdan’s case, The Challenge. Mahler said he’s not aware of any direct proof that the CIA interrogated Hamdan -- with "enhanced interrogation techniques" or otherwise -- but there was "a big date gap in the catalog of his interrogations."

IBM's Pivotal Role in the HolocaustEdwin Black www.thecuttingedgenews.comJuly 28th 2008

In August 1943, a timber merchant from Bendzin, Poland, arrived at Auschwitz. He was among a group of 400 inmates, mostly Jews. First, a doctor examined him briefly to determine his fitness for work. His physical information was noted on a medical record. Second, his full prisoner registration was completed with all personal details. Third, his name was checked against the indices of the Political Section to see if he would be subjected to special punishment. Finally, he was registered in the Labor Assignment Office and assigned a characteristic five-digit IBM Hollerith number, 44673.

The five-digit Hollerith number was part of a custom punch card system devised by IBM to track prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, including the slave labor at Auschwitz.

The Polish timber merchant's punch card number would follow him from labor assignment to labor assignment as Hollerith systems tracked him and his availability for work, and reported the data to the central inmate file eventually kept at Department DII. Department DII of the SS Economics Administration in Oranienburg oversaw all camp slave labor assignments, utilizing elaborate IBM systems.

Later in the summer of 1943, the Polish timber merchant's same five-digit Hollerith number, 44673, was tattooed on his forearm. Eventually, during the summer of 1943, all non-Germans at Auschwitz were similarly tattooed.

Tattoos, however, quickly evolved at Auschwitz. Soon, they bore no further relation to Hollerith compatibility for one reason: the Hollerith number was designed to track a working inmate-not a dead one. Once the daily death rate at Auschwitz climbed, Hollerith-based numbering simply became outmoded. Soon, ad hoc numbering systems were inaugurated at Auschwitz.

Various number ranges, often with letters attached, were assigned to prisoners in ascending sequence. Dr. Josef Mengele, who performed cruel experiments, tattooed his own distinct number series on "patients." Tattoo numbering schemes ultimately took on a chaotic incongruity all its own as an internal Auschwitz-specific identification system.

However, Hollerith numbers remained the chief method Berlin employed to centrally identify and track prisoners at Auschwitz. For example, in late 1943, some 6,500 healthy, working Jews were ordered to the gas chamber by the SS. But their murder was delayed for two days as the Political Section meticulously checked each of their numbers against the Section's own card index. The Section was under orders to temporarily reprieve any Jews with traces of Aryan parentage.

Sigismund Gajda was another Auschwitz inmate processed by the Hollerith system. Born in Kielce, Poland, Gajda was about 40 years of age when on May 18, 1943, he arrived at Auschwitz. A plain paper form, labeled "Personal Inmate Card," listed all of Gajda's personal information. He professed Roman Catholicism, had two children, and his work skill was marked "mechanic."

The reverse side of his Personal Inmate Card listed nine previous work assignments. Once Gajda's card was processed by IBM equipment, a large indicia in typical Nazi Gothic script was rubber-stamped at the bottom: "Hollerith erfasst," or "Hollerith registered." Indeed, that designation was stamped in large letters on hundreds of thousands of processed Personal Inmate Cards at camps all across Europe.

The Extermination by Labor campaign itself depended upon specially designed IBM systems that matched worker skills and locations with labor needs across Nazi-dominated Europe. Once the prisoner was too exhausted to work, he was murdered by gas or bullet. Exterminated prisoners were coded "six" in the IBM system.

The Polish timber merchant's Hollerith tattoo, Sigismund Gajda's inmate form, and the victimization of millions more at Auschwitz live on as dark icons of IBM's conscious 12-year business alliance with Nazi Germany. IBM's custom-designed prisoner-tracking Hollerith punch card equipment allowed the Nazis to efficiently manage the hundreds of concentration camps and sub-camps throughout Europe, as well as the millions who passed through them. Auschwitz' camp code in the IBM tabulation system was 001.

Nearly every Nazi concentration camp operated a Hollerith Department known as the Hollerith Abteilung. The three-part Hollerith system of paper forms, punch cards and processing machines varied from camp to camp and from year to year, depending upon conditions.

In some camps, such as Dachau and Storkow, as many as two dozen IBM sorters, tabulators, and printers were installed. Other facilities operated punchers only and submitted their cards to central locations such as Mauthausen or Berlin. In some camps, such as Stuthoff, the plain paper forms were coded and processed elsewhere. Hollerith activity, whether paper, punching or processing, was frequently-but not always--located within the camp itself, consigned to a special bureau called the Labor Assignment Office, known in German as the Arbeitseinsatz. The Arbeitseinsatz issued the all-important life-sustaining daily work assignments, and processed all inmate cards and labor transfer rosters.

IBM did not sell any of its punch card machines to Nazi Germany. The equipment was leased by the month. Each month, often more frequently, authorized repairmen, working directly for or trained by IBM, serviced the machines on-site-whether in the middle of Berlin or at a concentration camp. In addition, all spare parts were supplied by IBM factories located throughout Europe. Of course, the billions of punch cards continually devoured by the machines, available exclusively from IBM, were extra.

IBM's extensive technological support for Hitler's conquest of Europe and genocide against the Jews was extensively documented in my book, IBM and the Holocaust, published in February 2001 and updated in a paperback edition. Shortly after publication of the paperback, the The Village Voice broke exclusive new details of a special IBM wartime subsidiary set up in Poland by IBM's New York headquarters shortly after Hitler's 1939 invasion.

In 1939, America had not entered the war, and it was still legal to trade with Nazi Germany. IBM's new Polish subsidiary, Watson Business Machines, helped Germany automate the rape of Poland. The subsidiary was named for its president Thomas J. Watson.

Central to the Nazi effort was a massive 500-man Hollerith Gruppe, installed in a looming brown building at 24 Murnerstrasse in Krakow. The Hollerith Gruppe of the Nazi Statistical Office crunched all the numbers of plunder and genocide that allowed the Nazis to systematically starve the Jews, meter them out of the ghettos and then transport them to either work camps or death camps.

The trains running to Auschwitz were tracked by a special guarded IBM customer site facility at 22 Pawia in Krakow. The millions of punch cards the Nazis in Poland required were obtained exclusively from IBM, including one company print shop at 6 Rymarska Street across the street from the Warsaw Ghetto. The entire Polish subsidiary was overseen by an IBM administrative facility at 24 Kreuz in Warsaw.

The exact address and equipment arrays of the key IBM offices and customer sites in Nazi-occupied Poland have been discovered. But no one has ever been able to locate an IBM facility at, or even near, Auschwitz. Until now. Auschwitz chief archivist Piotr Setkiewicz finally pinpointed the first such IBM customer site.

The newly unearthed IBM customer site was a huge Hollerith Büro. It was situated in the I.G. Farben factory complex, housed in Barracks 18, next to German Civil Worker Camp 7, about two kilometers from Auschwitz III, also known as Monowitz Concentration Camp.

Auschwitz' Setkiewicz explains, "The Hollerith office at IG Farben in Monowitz used the IBM machines as a system of computerization of civil and slave labor resources. This gave Farben the opportunity to identify people with certain skills, primarily skills needed for the construction of certain buildings in Monowitz."

By way of background, what most people call "Auschwitz" was actually a sprawling hell comprised of three concentration camps, surrounded by some 40 subcamps, numerous factories and a collection of farms in a surrounding captive commercial zone. The original Auschwitz became known simply as Auschwitz I, and functioned as a diversified camp for transit, labor and detention. Auschwitz II, also called Birkenau, became the infamous extermination center, operating gas chambers and ovens. Nearby Auschwitz III, known as Monowitz, existed primarily as a slave labor camp. Monowitz is where IBM's bustling customer site functioned.

Many of the long-known paper prisoner forms stamped Hollerith Erfasst, or "registered by Hollerith," indicated the prisoners were from Auschwitz III, that is, Monowitz. Now Auschwitz archivist Setkiewicz has also discovered about 100 Hollerith machine summary printouts of Monowitz prisoner assignments and details generated by the I.G. Farben customer site.For example, Alexander Kuciel, born August 12, 1889, was in 1944 deployed as a slave carpenter, skill coded 0149, and his Hollerith printout is marked "Sch/P," the Reich abbreviation for Schutzhäftling/Pole.Schutzhäftling/Pole means "Polish political prisoner."

The giant Farben facilities, also known as "I.G. Werk Auschwitz," maintained two Hollerith Büro staff contacts, Herr Hirsch and Herr Husch. One key man running the card index systems was Eduard Müller. Müller was a fat, aging, ill-kempt man, with brown hair and brown eyes. Some said, "He stank like a polecat." A rabid Nazi, Müller took special delight in harming inmates from his all-important position in camp administration.

Comparison of the new printouts to other typical camp cards shows the Monowitz systems were customized for the specific coding Farben needed to process the thousands of slave workers who labored and died there. The machines were probably also used to manage and develop manufacturing processes and ordinary business applications. The machines almost certainly did not maintain extermination totals, which were calculated as "evacuations" by the Hollerith Gruppe in Krakow. At press time, the diverse Farben codes and range of machine uses are still being studied.

It is not known how many additional IBM customer sites researchers will discover in the cold ashes of the expansive commercial Auschwitz zone.A Hollerith Büro, such as the one at Auschwitz III, was larger than a typical mechanized concentration camp Hollerith Department. A Büro was generally comprised of more than a dozen punching machines, a sorter and one tabulator. Leon Krzemieniecki was a compulsory worker who operated a tabulator at the IBM customer site at the Polish railways office in Krakow that kept track of trains going to and from Auschwitz. He recalls, "I know that trains were constantly going from Krakow to Auschwitz--not only passenger trains, but cargo trains as well." Krzemieniecki, who worked for two years with IBM punchers, card sorters and tabulators, estimates that a punch card operation for so large a manufacturing complex as Farben "would probably require at least two high-speed tabulators, four sorters, and perhaps 20 punchers." He added, "The whole thing would probably require 30-40 persons, plus their German supervisors."

The revelation of IBM technology in the Auschwitz area constitutes the final link in the chain of documentation surrounding Big Blue's vast enterprise in Nazi-occupied Poland, supervised at first directly from its New York headquarters, and later through its Geneva office. Jewish leaders and human rights activists were again outraged. "This latest disclosure removes any pretext of deniability and completes the puzzle that has been put together about IBM in Poland," declared Malcolm Hoenlein, vice president of the New York-based Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. "The picture that emerges is most disturbing," added Hoenlein. "IBM must confront this matter honestly if there is to be any closure."

Marek Orski, state historian of the museum at Poland's Stuthoff Concentration Camp, has distinguished himself as that country's leading expert on the use of IBM technology at Nazi concentration camps in occupied Poland. "This latest information," asserts Orski, "proves once more that IBM's Hollerith machines in occupied Poland were functioning in the area of yet another concentration camp, in this case Auschwitz-Monowitz-something completely unknown until now. It is yet another significant revelation in what has become the undoubted fact of IBM's involvement in Poland. Now we need to compile more documents identifying the exact activity of this Hollerith Büro in Auschwitz Monowitz."

Krzemieniecki is convinced obtaining such documents would be difficult. "It would be great to have access to those documents," he said, "but where are they?" He added, "Please remember, I witnessed in 1944, when the war front came closer to Poland, that all the IBM machines in Krakow were removed. I'm sure the Farben machines were being moved at the same time. Plus, the Germans were busy destroying all the records. Even still," he continues, "what has been revealed thus far is a great achievement."

Auschwitz historians were originally convinced that there were no machines at Auschwitz, that all the prisoner documents were processed at a remote location, primarily because they could find no trace of the equipment in the area. They even speculated that the stamped forms from Auschwitz III were actually punched at the massive Hollerith service at Mauthausen concentration camp. Indeed, even the Farben Hollerith documents had been identified some time ago at Auschwitz, but were not understood as IBM printouts. That is, not until the Hollerith Büro itself was discovered.

Archivists only found the Büro because it was listed in the I.G. Werk Auschwitz phone book on page 50. The phone extension was 4496. "I was looking for something else," recalls Auschwitz' Setkiewicz, "and there it was." Once the printouts were reexamined in the light of IBM punch card revelations, the connection became clear.

Setkiewicz says, "We still need to find more similar identification cards and printouts, and try to find just how extensive was the usage in the whole I.G. Farben administration and employment of workers. But no one among historians has had success in finding these documents."

In the current climate of intense public scrutiny of corporate subsidiaries, IBM's evasive response has aroused a renewed demand for accountability. "In the day of Enron and Tyco," says Robert Urekew, a University of Louisville professor of business ethics, "we now know these are not impersonal entities. They are directed by people with names and faces." Prof. Urekew, who has studied IBM's Hitler-era activities, continued, "The news that IBM machines were at Auschwitz is just the latest smoking gun. For IBM to continue to stonewall and hinder access to its New York archives flies in the face of the focus on accountability in business ethics today. Since the United States was not technically at war with Nazi Germany in 1939, it may have been legal for IBM to do business with the Third Reich and its camps in Poland. But was it moral?"

Even some IBM employees are frustrated by IBM's silence. Michael Zamczyk, for example, is a long-time IBM employee in San Jose, California, working on business controls. A loyal IBMer, Zamczyk has worked for the company for some 28 years. He is also probably the only IBM employee who survived the Krakow ghetto in 1941 and 1942. Since revelations about IBM's ties to Hitler exploded into public view in February 2001, Zamczyk has been demanding answers-and an apology--from IBM senior management.

"Originally," says Zamczyk, "I was just trying to determine if it was IBM equipment that helped select my father to be shipped to Auschwitz, and if the machines were used to schedule the trains to Auschwitz."

Zamczyk started writing letters and emails, but to no avail. He could not get any concrete response about IBM's activities during the Hitler era. "I contacted senior management, all the way up to the president, trying to get an answer,"states Zamczyk. "Since then, I have read the facts about IBM in Poland, about the railroad department at 22 Pawia Street in Krakow, and I read about the eyewitnesses. Now I feel that IBM owes me, as an IBM employee, an apology. And that is all I am looking for."

Zamczyk was met by stony silence from IBM executives. "The only response I got," he relates, "was basically telling me there would be no public or private apology. But I am still waiting for that apology and debating what to do next."

Repeated attempts to obtain IBM reaction to the Auschwitz disclosure were rebuffed by IBM spokesman Carol Makovich. Despite being phoned more than a dozen times, Makovich did not respond, or grant me permission to examine Polish, Brazilian and French subsidiary documents at the company's Somers, New York archives. Nor has the company been forthcoming to numerous Jewish leaders, consumers and members of the media who have demanded answers.

At one point, Makovich quipped to a Reuters correspondent, "We are a technology company, we are not historians."

Edwin Black is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of IBM and the Holocaust, and the forthcoming book, The Plan--How to Save America the Day after the Oil Stops— or Perhaps the Day Before (Dialog Press, September 2008). This essay was adapted from a 2001 article which originally appeared in the Village Voice and syndicated thereafter, which received the award for Best Investigative Article of the Year by American Society of Journalists and Authors.

Sunday, July 27, 2008

He sold a thumb drive containing information on personnel at Marine Corps Reserve Center in San Antonio for $500

By Grant Gross

Anonymous says:First of all, this guy is a traitor. If he isn’t shot right away, he should never see daylight again....

Anonymous says:Five, possibly 7 years; not enough of a deterrent. I say, he should be put against the wall and shot....

May 2, 2008 (IDG News Service) WASHINGTON -- A former U.S. military contractor has pleaded guilty to exceeding authorized access to a computer and aggravated identity theft after he was accused of selling names and Social Security numbers of 17,000 military employees, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

Randall Craig, 41, of Houston, pleaded guilty today to both counts of an indictment returned in April by a grand jury in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. Craig acknowledged selling information contained in a military database to a person he believed to represent a foreign government, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Texas and the FBI.

The person who purchased the names and Social Security numbers from Craig was an undercover FBI agent, they said.

Craig worked as a private computer contractor at the Marine Corps Reserve Center in San Antonio in September 2007, and he had access to personal information of U.S. Marines in the center's database, the DOJ said.

On Feb. 6, Craig met with someone he believed to be a representative of a foreign government at the Houston airport to discuss the sale of a thumb drive containing the information Craig had obtained from the military database, the DOJ said. Craig sold the thumb drive for $500, the agency said.

"Our personal identification information is readily available to those who have a legitimate use for it as well as those who do not, such as Mr. Craig," U.S. Attorney Don DeGabrielle said in a statement. "Because he sought to profit from this identity theft, we moved swiftly and justly -- as we will in all such cases -- to protect our military heroes and to protect everyone in the conduct of their personal affairs."

A forensic examination conducted by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service determined the data was from the Marine Corps Reserve Center where Craig worked, the DOJ said. The thumb drive contained personal information of 17,000 people assigned to the Battalion of the U.S. Marine Corps in San Antonio, the DOJ said. The investigation found that none of the information obtained by Craig was sold to others or otherwise compromised.

At a Feb. 22 meeting with the FBI undercover agent, Craig said he had made efforts to contact other foreign countries in an attempt to offer his services, according to the DOJ. The undercover agent and Craig discussed future contact, using cell phones and e-mail.

The conviction for exceeding authorized access to a computer for financial gain carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. Aggravated identity theft carries a mandatory two-year sentence that must be served consecutive to any sentence imposed for the charge of exceeding authorized access. Both counts also include maximum fines of $250,000.

Craig is scheduled to be sentenced July 28. He is being held in federal custody without bond, the DOJ said.

" ... U.S. oversaw exterminations: Alan Winnington of the British Daily Worker in an article entitled “U.S. Belsen in Korea” reported that 20 witnesses observed that truckloads of cops arrived on July 2 and immediately made people dig six pits of about 200 yards each. Executions went on for three days, by both machinegun and, when the bullets ran out, decapitation by sword ... "

As told by most history textbooks in the U.S., the Korean War started with a June 25, 1950, invasion from the communist north and the freedom-loving U.S. came to the aid of the besieged democratic Republic of Korea in the south. The reality was very different.

Not only did the RoK’s dictatorial, fascist-like regime of U.S. puppet Syngman Rhee make the first move, it had prepared for it for more than a year in advance. These preparations included using paramilitary fascist organizations and the regular army for cross-border raids on northern villages to test the defenses of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).

Domestically, the preparation meant carrying out large-scale executions of suspected communists, leftists and anyone who opposed the neo-colonial rule of the U.S. in the south. The majority of these massacres took place throughout the summer of 1950, but thousands of civilians were executed by RoK military and police throughout the war.

The U.S. military—which had operational command of the RoK army—not only was aware of the massacres, but assisted and even directed many of the executions.

That these massacres had occurred was common knowledge among people both north and south. Due to the repressive anti-communist National Security Law, which threatened penalties of decades in prison, no one in the south dared to speak up until recently.

A half century of official silence finally began to end after the hard struggle of the pro-democracy movement in the 1980s created a political space. Even those who fled to the U.S. to escape the repression couldn’t speak up. They were dependent on established Korean-Americans for jobs, housing and loans, and these privileged elements often had ties to the right-wing Grand National Party or the Korean Central Intelligence Agency.

One voice through the decades spoke the truth to the world about the mass murders. The press in the DPRK constantly tried to bring these crimes to the attention of the world. Because Washington’s racist anti-DPRK propaganda was all-pervasive, the truth never gained any traction in the corporate mass media around the world.

Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Today in the RoK, a government-funded Truth and Reconciliation Commission headed by Ahn Byung-ook is investigating 1,200 incidents of mass executions in addition to 215 cases in which the U.S. military was directly involved in the executions. Of the more than 150 mass graves unearthed so far, the commission has the physical evidence, documentation and eyewitnesses to officially confirm two mass executions at Ulsan and Cheongwon.

The RoK government now acknowledges that its military, national police and fascist paramilitaries killed over 100,000 civilians at that time, when Korea’s population was 20 million. Kim Dong-choon of the TRC called these government estimates of the human cost of this bloody anti-communist paroxysm “very conservative.”

The numbers may be as high as 200,000 people, with some sources putting it as high as 300,000. These numbers do not even include the extra-judicial executions during the war of those RoK puppet troops deemed to be sympathetic to the liberation forces from the DPRK.

Rightist ideologues, both in Seoul and Washington, point to alleged massacres carried out by the Korean People’s Army, while denying that the actual proven murders perpetrated by the southern puppet forces even took place. In reality, according to a CIA study dated July 19, 1950, cited by Korea scholar Bruce Cumings, during the occupation of the south by the KPA “North Korean officials ran a tight ship but without a lot of bloodshed.”

In another CIA report from 1950, a “large percentage” of trade unionists and union leaders joined the KPA only 10 days into the war. DPRK President Kim Il Sung had given a radio address calling on people in the RoK to organize themselves. People’s Committees were formed and went about seizing Japanese and RoK government property as well as that of the rich.

KPA units in the south distributed rice to the people and emptied the jails of political prisoners, who then turned on the cops and the fascist youth groups. KPA troops, in alliance with the poor peasantry, carried out democratic land reform as they swept southwards. Even in the chaos of war, the KPA maintained its discipline. Cumings says that “captured North Korean documents continued to show that high-level officials warned against executing people.”

The same cannot be said of the RoK puppet forces. Before the war even began, the RoK government created the National Guidance League, a fascist-inspired “re-education” corps for people the Rhee dictatorship claimed were communists. By 1950, more than 300,000 people were forced to join the League.

Kim Dong-choon says the police or the military executed many of the League’s forced inductees. National Police under Korean Military Advisory Group supervision executed 7,000 people in Yangwol (near Taejon) from July 2-6, 1950.

U.S. oversaw exterminations

Alan Winnington of the British Daily Worker in an article entitled “U.S. Belsen in Korea” reported that 20 witnesses observed that truckloads of cops arrived on July 2 and immediately made people dig six pits of about 200 yards each. Executions went on for three days, by both machinegun and, when the bullets ran out, decapitation by sword. According to eyewitnesses, U.S. officers oversaw everything while sitting in their Jeeps. The U.S. Embassy in London then had the chutzpah to call Winnington’s findings a “fabrication.”

The U.S. military, through its operational command over the RoK army, was involved at the highest level in the executions. New York Times correspondent Charles Grutzner talked about “the slaughter of hundreds of South Korean civilians, women as well as men, by some U.S. troops and police of the Republic.”

Keyes Beech, in a July 23, 1950, Newark Star-Ledger article wrote: “It is not the time to be a Korean, for the Yankees are shooting them all.”

Donald Nichols, a former Air Force intelligence officer, wrote in his 1981 memoir of witnessing an “unforgettable massacre” of “approximately 1,800” at Suwon during the war.

In addition, an investigation made by RoK lawmaker Park Chan-hyun in 1960 during the (relatively) democratic interlude of Chang Myon’s Second Republic revealed that an estimated 10,000 people were executed in Busan.

RoK dictatorship was shaky

What these horrible, inhuman atrocities reveal is that the puppet RoK dictatorship knew its power rested upon a profoundly shaky foundation. As another quite frank CIA report cited by Cumings noted, the rightist RoK leadership “is provided by that numerically small class which virtually monopolizes the native wealth and education of the country.... Since this class could not have acquired and maintained its favored position under Japanese rule without a certain minimum of ‘collaboration,’ it has experienced difficulty in finding acceptable candidates for political office and has been forced to support imported expatriate politicians such as Rhee Syngman and Kim Koo. These, while they have no pro-Japanese taint, are essentially demagogues bent on autocratic rule.”

Rhee’s venal clique knew that his planned drive north depended upon drowning the patriotic and communist elements in the south in blood. Pockets of communist guerrillas who had fought the Japanese occupation were still active in the south as late as 1950.

According to KMAG commander Gen. W.L. Roberts, the RoK puppet army killed 6,000 communist guerrillas from November 1949 to March 1950. Of the attacks on northern border villages carried out by the army and the fascist Northwest Youth paramilitaries that took pace in 1949, Gen. Roberts said that “each was in our opinion brought on by the presence of a small South Korean salient north of the (38th) parallel.... The South Koreans wish to invade the North.”

Despite the staggering scale of the mass murders carried out by the Rhee puppet regime, patriotic feeling still ran so deep among the Korean people that even in the RoK National Assembly, 48 members declared their allegiance to the DPRK at the end of July 1950.

The issue of the mass execution of civilians still divides those who are subservient to U.S. neo-colonialism and those who want an independent Korea. Former RoK president Roh Moo-hyun apologized in an official capacity for the 870 confirmed murders at Ulsan, calling them “illegal acts.” In stark contrast, current president Lee Myung-bak, already deeply unpopular, has threatened to cut funding for the TRC.

Seven years ago, the U.S. government finally admitted part of its own guilt, that its soldiers had killed hundreds of innocent civilians in the South Korean township of Nogun-ri shortly after the start of the Korean War in 1950. President Bill Clinton himself expressed “deep regret” in a public statement on Jan. 11, 2001.

The unexpected release by the US government of secret grand jury testimony from the Rosenberg atomic secrets spy case of 1951 has revealed the death of Ruth Greenglass, aged 83, who had been living under an alias. She was a crucial prosecution witness in the case. The wife of one of the accused, David Greenglass, she testified that her sister-in-law, Ethel Rosenberg, had typed up secret information on the United States' Manhattan Project to be passed through Rosenberg's husband, Julius, to the Soviet authorities. Ms Greenglass's evidence ensured Rosenberg went, with her husband, to the electric chair in 1953 for conspiracy to commit atomic espionage.

The trial, held at the height of America's post-war anti-communist hysteria, aroused protests around the world. The gradual release of official documents since has left little doubt that Rosenberg was guilty as charged, but that Ms Rosenberg may well have been a victim of perjury by the Greenglasses. In 2001 a New York Times reporter traced Greenglass (Ms Rosenberg's brother) living under an assumed name. Interviewed on television under a heavy disguise, he acknowledged he and his wife's court statements had been untrue.

The drama began in February 1950 with the arrest by the British of Klaus Fuchs, a scientist who had worked on the US atomic bomb project at Los Alamos and who was jailed for 14 years for passing classified information to the Soviet Union. His interrogation by Scotland Yard, allied to an American decoding breakthrough which enabled them to read reams of intercepted wartime KGB messages, led to the arrest of Rosenberg in July 1950.

Senator Joseph McCarthy had just launched his ferocious attack on the supposed nest of communists operating in most of official Washington. In the face of that onslaught, J.Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, envisaged a public relations triumph for himself and the bureau, as it rounded up what appeared to be a significant spy network. Within days Hoover had sent a memorandum to the US attorney-general Howard McGrath saying, ''There is no question that if Julius Rosenberg would furnish details of his extensive espionage activities it would be possible to proceed against other individuals. Proceeding against his wife might serve as a lever in these matters.''

David Greenglass, a technical sergeant involved in machining parts at the Manhattan Project, originally attracted the FBI's attention for stealing small quantities of uranium as a souvenir. Under questioning, he admitted acting as a Soviet spy at Los Alamos and named Rosenberg as one of his contacts. But he flatly denied that his sister, Ms Rosenberg, had ever been involved. Though he told the FBI at the time that his wife had acted as a courier, he said in his 2001 television interview that he had warned the bureau, ''If you indict my wife you can forget it. I'll never say a word about anybody.''

The difficulty with Hoover's proposed strategy of using Rosenberg's wife as a lever was that there was no evidence against her. Nonetheless, she was arrested and her two children were taken into care. The Rosenbergs' bail was set at $100,000 each, which they had no hope of raising, and the pressure on them to incriminate others increased. Neither offered any further information.

Ten days before the start of the trial, the FBI re-interviewed the Greenglasses. In his original statement, Greenglass had said that he handed over atomic information to Rosenberg on a street corner in New York. In this new interview, he said that the handover had taken place in the living room of the Rosenbergs' New York flat. Ms Greenglass then elaborated on this by telling the FBI agents, ''Julius then took the info into the bathroom and read it, and when he came out he told [Ethel] she had to type this info immediately. Ms Rosenberg then sat down at the typewriter ... and proceeded to type the info which David had given to Julius.''

Ms Greenglass and her husband repeated this evidence in the witness box and it became the basis of Ms Rosenberg's conviction as a co-conspirator. However, the court verdict failed to induce a confession from Rosenberg. There were innumerable unsuccessful appeals, and up until the night of the execution President Dwight Eisenhower was on stand-by to commute the Rosenbergs' sentences. But the couple remained silent.

Born Ruth Printz, Ms Greenglass grew up in the same New York district as her future husband. They were married in 1942, when she was 18 and he just 20. Their interest in politics prompted them to join the Young Communist League. In 1944, Ms Greenglass left New York for Albuquerque, New Mexico, to be near her husband in Los Alamos. It was during this time she allegedly asked Greenglass to pass on any information he had about the Manhattan Project to Rosenberg.

In exchange for her evidence in the 1951 trial, Ms Greenglass was given immunity from prosecution. After the verdict, she lost her job but continued to live in New York under a protective alias. Her husband was jailed for 15 years, and, on his release in 1960, the couple lived together under assumed names.

Then, 48 years after Ms Rosenberg's execution, Greenglass recanted he and his wife's account of the meeting in the apartment. Instead, he said, ''[Julius] asked me to write up some stuff, which I did, and then he had it typed. I don't know who typed it, frankly. And to this day I can't even remember that the typing took place. But somebody typed it. Now I'm not sure who it was and I don't even think it was done while we were there.''